Supercomputing 2013: How Dell is accelerating research initiatives for customers around the globe

Every November, the brightest minds in the high performance computing industry congregate at the Supercomputing Conference to take a look at what’s new in the HPC space, evaluate how far we’ve come, and focus on what’s next. It was five years ago at the SC08 conference where Michael Dell took center stage to discuss his company’s commitment to providing affordable access to, and improving the use of, high performance computing. This year’s conference promises to be another exciting one for Dell because our customers will be highlighting some ground-breaking milestones they’ve achieved using Dell HPC solutions.

A lot has changed since 2008. First, there’s the recent news regarding Dell’s privatization, which will allow us to continue to innovate and deliver the cutting-edge solutions that our customers, especially those in the academic and research space, desperately need. Second, HPC technology is greatly impacting our daily lives now more than ever as scientific and medical organizations leverage HPC to pursue breakthroughs in their research.

This year’s Supercomputing Conference is taking place in Denver, Colorado and Dell is taking the opportunity to showcase our latest and greatest customer success stories that truly emphasize the impact HPC technology is having on the world. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of California, San Diego and The University of Texas at Austin  specifically require high performance computing technologies to deliver peak performance so they can acquire, analyze, store and manage large volumes of data – something which is so crucial in their research. Dell server, storage and networking solutions designed specifically for hyperscale and research computing environments help accelerate scientific research while delivering supercomputer-class performance in less space with less power, enabling the scientific community to satisfy demands at lower cost as well as maximum density.

Dell is also redefining HPC by collaborating with others in the HPC ecosystem. Today we are excited to announce our recent efforts with NVIDIA. Coming soon, our flexible PowerEdge R720 server will be shipping with the newly launched NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU accelerator factory installed. With double the memory and up to 40 percent higher performance than its predecessor, the Tesla K20X GPU, and 10 times higher performance than today’s fastest CPU, NVIDIA is calling this the world’s first and highest-performance accelerator optimized for big data analytics and large-scale scientific workloads. We’ll be releasing additional performance numbers on the R720 in the coming weeks—be sure to check back for more. 

Dell is delivering on its commitment by continuing to drive HPC innovations for its customers. While we have made dramatic improvements, we realize there is more work to be done. We look forward to SC13 and hearing more from our customers and others about challenges they are facing and the state of the HPC industry.

For those of you on-site at SC13 please visit us at the Dell booth #1301 to chat with our experts. I also invite you to stop by our two customer panels highlighting issues so many in the research industry are having: managing increasing amounts of data and leveraging virtualization.

Solving the HPC Data Deluge: 21st Century Storage Best Practices

Wednesday, November 20, 2013 1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.

As science drives a rapidly growing need for storage, existing environments face increasing pressure to expand capabilities while controlling costs. Many researchers, scientists and engineers find that they are outgrowing their current system, but fear they may be too small to cover the cost and support needed for more storage. Join experts from University of Florida, University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of North Texas for a lively discussion on how you can take control and solve the HPC data deluge.

You thought HPC virtualization was never going to happen?

Wednesday, November 20, 2013 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

HPC clusters have become a cornerstone for many scientific fields including some we’d never expected, such as biology. Virtualization is essential to a vast new era of systems and has (with some hype) given birth to ‘The Cloud’. The two are not necessarily incompatible and work is being done to bring benefits that enterprise users of virtualization enjoy to the HPC arena where — despite years of experience — we still battle with the challenge that large scale computing presents. This panel, with customers from the University of California, Florida State University, Cambridge University, University of Oklahoma and Australian National University, will challenge old notions, update you on current activities and provoke a debate about what’s needed for the future.

About the Author: Tim Carroll